Rahul Gupta and Carla Winter were able to "couples match" to residencies at Massachusetts General Brigham.
Accomplishing the complex feat of “couples matching”—Gupta and Winter will both start residency at Massachusetts General Brigham this fall.
Mindy Blodgett | IMES/HST
The story of Rahul Gupta and Carla Winter begins in 2015, when they met while undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania—Winter studying bioengineering, and Gupta majoring in chemical engineering. After spending a year as colleagues, they began dating, and upon graduation they stayed a couple, persisting through the challenge of a long-distance “gap year,” eventually entering the HST MD program together.
But their biggest accomplishment as partners in medicine, so far, came this past spring, when, just before graduating with their HST MDs, they managed the complex feat of “couples matching”—meaning that this fall, the two will both start residency programs at Massachusetts General Brigham (MGB)—Gupta for Internal Medicine, and Winter for Neurology.
“We are very grateful to have couples matched,” Winter says. “It’s been great to have a friend along the way, someone who can understand the ins and outs of your day. And now we’ll be able to support each other on the next adventure.”
The National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) facilitates the matching process by using a computer algorithm to match applicants to residency spots. To align their choices, couples need to rank their combined preferences, and tick off a box so that the algorithm will pair the applications. And the couples attempting to match must consider factors like program compatibility, location, and the potential for dual-career success.
Each found their way to medicine along different paths. Winter, raised in New Jersey, said that she became interested in studying the nervous system after experiencing her father recovering from significant injury while she was a middle school student. When she arrived at Penn, she says, “I knew I wanted to pursue science long term, and I had an inclination to medicine—I knew that I wanted to dive deeper into nervous system repair…neural injury is a huge problem, and we don’t yet have solutions for so many patients.”
Upon graduation from Penn, she was awarded a Mitchell Scholarship (a competitive scholarship sponsored by the US-Ireland Alliance), proceeding to get a master’s degree in regenerative medicine at the University of Galway in Ireland. She says that while she already knew that she was drawn to clinical medicine, the “unifying theme” of the Mitchell Scholarship is commitment to public service, which strengthened her interest. She spent a “wonderful year” in Ireland, broadly focused on regenerative medicine, but also taking tissue engineering classes, basics in immunology and neurobiology, and learning “how science, and coursework, is done outside of the US…it solidified for me that I wanted to do research long term, and that I really liked this field of neural injury and repair.”
Gupta, who grew up in Connecticut, stayed stateside for his year of exploration after college. His says that his interest in medicine began late in his undergraduate career. While working at a needle exchange clinic there, he fell in love with how physicians were able to use human physiology to improve the health of patients at their most vulnerable. During his gap year, having done basic biology research as an undergrad, he decided that he wanted to gain additional computational research skills. He was able to join the Pagliarini Lab, then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, run by Dave Pagliarini, who was then a professor there (he, and the lab, are now at Washington University)—despite the fact that Gupta wasn’t a graduate student, or a post-doc enrolled at Wisconsin at the time. “I was very lucky,” Gupta says. “I really liked programming, and that was what the lab needed at the time, so Dave hired me.”
One of the primary projects at the lab was research into understanding how genetic factors might influence levels of fatty acids and lipid species, via studying mice. “I worked on building computational tools to understand, and to generate hypotheses, about how fatty acid and lipid species may be regulated in individuals…It really got me excited about how genetics can teach us about how metabolism works,” Gupta says.
When it came time to apply to medical school, both Gupta, and Winter, were drawn to HST. As Winter says, “HST really lends itself to students who are on this physician-scientist path…my undergraduate education emphasized not just understanding the biology and human physiology, but also the importance of understanding the mechanisms of human health…Of all the programs I considered, HST was the only one that emphasized that mechanistic way of thinking.”
Gupta agrees, adding that he also found HST appealing, because he felt that it would offer a broad education, and expose him to principles of graduate-level research. In fact, both Winter and Gupta obtained PhDs from the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) Program at Harvard Medical School, while studying for their MDs. For her PhD, Winter continued working in the field of neural injury and repair. She completed her thesis in the Zhigang He Lab at Boston Children’s hospital, studying the organization and repair of brain-spinal cord connections. For his PhD, Gupta used genetic sequences across hundreds of thousands of people to uncover new factors controlling genetic material within the mitochondria (the “powerhouse” of the cell), and to advance the understanding of whether mitochondria influence age-related disease. He was jointly mentored by Dr. Vamsi Mootha and Dr. Benjamin Neale at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).
Now, as they look to deepen their clinical knowledge and expertise in residency, and to plan a wedding to take place in May 2026, they look back fondly on their time at HST.
Winter recalls how when she was considering HST, leadership, including Matthew Frosch, MD, PhD (professor, Pathology, MGH, and HMS; associate director, admissions, HST, HMS) “were so welcoming and super helpful, reaching out to ask if there were any questions he could answer…fast forward, and it was still Dr. Frosch, Rick Mitchell (MD, PhD, professor, pathology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, HMS; associate director, curriculum, HST, HMS), Junne Kamihara (MD, PhD, Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, HMS; associate director, MD advising, HST)—they were always there and ready for if we reached out for help. And I’ve definitely done my fair share of reaching out!”
“That’s my advice for anyone considering HST, and to incoming students: there are people here who are ready to help, so don’t hesitate to ask,” she advises.
Gupta said he agreed with Winter, and he added, “One thing I might say is that I urge people to embrace serendipity as they start their studies. I did not come to HST with a perfect plan about the lab I wanted to join, or the research area I wanted to pursue. Frankly, I think that Carla had a clearer vision for herself than I did. But I think that for some of us, it also can be good to just embrace what seems like a good opportunity in the moment. Because there are just so many fantastic opportunities, it’s hard to go wrong.”